I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of this blog and my place in the digital arena.

I started blogging in 2006 and kept a somewhat solid presence in this field until 2014, when I trailed off and went to Medium for a while. To say that the blogosphere has changed a lot in the past two decades is an understatement.

So now, coming truly back to this universe after a decade-long hiatus made me feel… well, lost. I recently rediscovered my first-ever blog, preserved just the way it was, and was shocked to remember how different things were.

For starters, there were fewer of us, so each publication got way more attention. My very first post, which basically said “I’ll start a blog with a bunch of colourful fonts, with no idea of what I’m doing whatsoever and no set theme” got 8 comments in a week, with many friends, classmates and even my dad leaving their thoughts on it. I also had some dear friends who started their blogs at the same time and we would all link each other. Over time I became a member of a small community of female bloggers in my city, and we would meet in what we called Lulu-Camps.

Back in the day, it was also much less complicated to create a blog – you could put something together for free on WordPress or Blogger and pay maybe $10 a year if you really wanted a domain. Nowadays, I have to pay $25/month just to keep WordPress from flooding my blog with ads.

That’s because blogging has become, as you well know, a profitable source of revenue. Nothing wrong with making money with what you love, but the bulk of the clicks now seem to go to pages built by teams of marketers who spend hours a day optimizing the content to cater to the needs of a specific market niche. The general public only reads a blog post to learn how to make cocktails or how to unfreeze their smartwatches (true stories) and the small blogs’ audience is reduced to other small bloggers.

That’s why I started this blog with an attitude of “I’ll post whatever I feel like, and just ignore the stats”. But the truth is, it’s hard to ignore the stats. Is hard to work for days on something you feel proud of, just to have absolutely no person but yourself reading it. On the other hand, I know that non-niche blogs are much harder to gain traction – I can’t retain people who like to discuss the Supreme Court and the flowers on the street at the same time, unless I find a bunch of clones of me out there.

But when I tried to deep dive into a niche and make “attractive content” I fell into another sort of trap. My plant YouTube channel got traction for a while, but it soon became clear that, if we wanted more views and some serious monetization, we needed to serve the algorithm.

And the algorithm said that people love Pothos plants. So we made videos about all the Pothos plants we could possibly find, and when we ran out of subspecies, we started a series of mini-videos on how to care for each variety. The only problem is that the care is exactly the same, whether you have a Jade Pothos or a N’Joy Pothos. So I saw myself recording five videos in a row talking about the same thing, but pretending they were different. I felt like a fraud.

What to do then?

I honestly don’t have an answer for you right now, my dear reader. I’m watching my site turn into a literary blog almost on its own will because I just like that topic so much right now. But at the same time, I don’t identify with the trending book blog content out there, who cater mostly to YA, Fantasy and Romance.

What I know is that I’m not going to post content that doesn’t make sense or it doesn’t feel like me. I don’t want to hit publish on anything I’m not proud of. At the same time, I want to find a community that I can truly fit into. So I’m just going to keep writing and looking until I reach the shore.